See the Series Introduction for Just Tao It, Part I: HERE
See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE
See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE

From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 21 (Unpublished):

Those who hold It,
Carry
a depth

No hand holds.
No cleverness
Claims.

Subtle.
Intangible.
Veiled.
Ever near.

Before beginning.
Beyond ending.
Beyond is.
Beyond is not.

Remaining.
Waiting.
Listening.
Seeing.
It.

—

A life carries more than it creates.

Long before we can name what is forming in us, other people are already there: parents and partners, teachers and friends, authors we will never meet, strangers whose kindness arrives at the necessary moment, even adversaries who expose an unfinished edge. Some remain close. Some disappear from our lives while their influence continues. Human development is intimate, and it is never solitary.

You may already sense who accompanies you. Someone long gone whose words still interrupt a bad decision. A teacher whose confidence arrived before your own. A place that steadied you. A tradition, practice, correction, wound, or promise that changed meaning as you changed. We speak of finding our way as though the path were an individual accomplishment. Most paths have fingerprints everywhere.

Chapter 21 places a curious image beside that recognition: those who hold It carry a depth, while no hand holds. Depth cannot be gripped, claimed, or secured through cleverness. It travels through presence, listening, seeing, practice, and relationship. We recognize it in people whose lives carry a coherence their words alone could never establish.

When I returned to this chapter, that image arrived with faces: heroes living and dead, met and unmet, people I spend hours with each week and people I have not seen in decades, people whose books I know intimately and people whose names may never appear on a book spine. After years of interpreting Lao Tzu, the chapter turned my attention toward those who shaped the person doing the interpreting.

Barry Johnson’s face came first. At the risk of sounding sentimental and overly admiring, I feel as though I won the mentor, partner, and friend lottery. I arrived at an inheritance that had already occupied his attention for half a century, and he welcomed me into it with remarkable generosity.

No one alive carries more depth and breadth of Polarity Thinking than Barry. And an enormous share of his time and energy still goes toward what looks, on the surface, like the most basic work there is: drawing or walking the infinity loop one more time for someone meeting it for the first time, walking a newcomer through Inhale AND Exhale as patiently as if he were hearing himself explain it for the first time too. It is a beautiful thing to witness, and, if I am honest, a little maddening — the kind of inefficiency I would love to engineer away if patience like his could be automated. I don’t have his patience myself; I have spent a fair share of my own career building systems and shortcuts partly because I lack it. And watching him meet each person exactly where they are, without hurry and without a hierarchy of who deserves his full attention, may be the truest expression of what this chapter is trying to say: depth is not measured by how far you’ve advanced past beginners. One way it’s measured is by how fully you show up for them anyway.

So, appreciating the man as much as the work comes easily. Barry applies his own discipline to his shortcomings. He owns what he misses. He adjusts. He has held me accountable while caring for me unconditionally, told me no when fairness required it, and remained my friend while I worked through the inconvenience.

I still wonder where my life and work would have gone if I had I not come across his book in my 2004 master’s program in Organization Development at American University. Years later, while serving as Vice President of Organization Development for the National Cooperative Bank, I hired him. By then, the Tao, Jim Collins’ work, and other streams were already converging in me. Barry gave that convergence language through maps, principles, processes, and, eventually, development of the a custom assessment platform and e-learning by the team at Polarity Partnerships to support meaningful measurement and scale.

That relationship opened into the global Polarity learning community and strategic partners I have had the honor to support—in China, India, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Egypt, Turkey, and many places in between. They showed me what happens when an idea becomes shared practice. They also changed how I understood my own life.

Barry has never asked me (or anybody) to hold his work as a possession. He has invited people to see what he sees, question it, test it in experience, add what can be added, and carry it forward. That may be why these lines brought him to mind:

Those who hold It,
Carry
a depth.
No hand holds.

At first, gratitude had Barry’s face. Then the floodgates opened. A life is shaped by many teachers, friends, partners, traditions, places, and communities. Mine carries an embarrassment of riches. Together they form what I have called an island of coherence in a sea of chaos—although even an island suggests edges easier to locate than these.

A list can honor people and inadvertently draw a perimeter around gratitude. Someone important will be missing. A name may stand for a relationship several paragraphs could barely hold. Another person may never know that a conversation, correction, or kindness altered my course. The names here are doorways into larger circles. They cannot be the boundary.

My partner of twenty-one years, Tracy, belongs close to the center. The person nearest to us encounters the whole curriculum: our enthusiasms, fears, useful and not-so-useful habits, blind spots, unfinished edges, and recurring conviction that the newest idea must be discussed immediately. Tracy has shared joy, health challenges, travel, work, uncertainty, and the continuing creations and dramas of Kayser Ridge. Her presence has made my life richer, lovelier, and much funnier.

My sister Lori has been my rock and one of the clearest examples of resilience in my life. A cancer fighter, she carried that resilience into founding the Team Tony Foundation and into her work as Chief Operating Officer of Xperience LLC. My sister Elizabeth and my brother Brad stand out as examples of motherhood and fatherhood—lives shaped around the care and well-being of another. Family gave me my earliest inheritances: those I embraced, those I resisted, and those I spent years learning to hold differently.

Friends have stayed through difficult seasons and celebrated the good ones without making either kind of season the whole story. Colleagues have asked questions I was avoiding. Partners and clients have trusted me with work none of us could have carried alone. Students have seen through an explanation and returned me to the raw experience beneath it. Their contributions enter how I meet the next person.

Some teachers arrived through disagreement. Some showed me the downside of a value by pursuing it too far. Some named a limit I did not want to hear. Some accepted an apology, and some gave me reason to make one. A few relationships ended while their teaching continued. Gratitude can include what was difficult without pretending the difficulty was good.

The circle includes people I have never met. Lao Tzu is the most obvious presence, joined by translators and interpreters whose work has accompanied mine: D. C. Lau, Ursula K. Le Guin, Red Pine, Roger Ames and David Hall, Stephen Mitchell, and others. They helped protect the Mystery from my desire to make it useful too quickly.

Other lineages gave me windows I needed. Jack Gibb’s work on trust and his teaching that seeing is loving reached me through Barry. Jim Collins gave me language for the Genius of the AND and the Flywheel. Ken Wilber, John Kessler, Bill Benet, Brené Brown, Richard Rohr, Barry Oshry, and many other researchers, practitioners, and wisdom teachers enlarged something I could recognize and had not yet learned to name. I am honoring several of these contributions more fully through Wiser Decisions because each stream deserves to be encountered in its own voice.

That list is real. It is also incomplete, and the incompleteness deserves to be named: nearly everyone on it looks like me. Some of my most profound learning about carrying a depth, and about Seeing It, has come from people who were on the Receiving end of injustice I have never known and Carried Forward anyway, through the example of how they lived. No book carries that teaching. Only watching them did. There are too many to name, and naming only a few would flatten what I owe to all of them. I have watched courage, dignity, and generosity practiced by people meeting a weight I will never have to meet myself. Whatever depth I carry, some of it belongs to them, learned from a distance I did not choose and cannot close.

There are also everyday heroes without platforms or credentials: a nurse who offered care when I felt defeated; a stranger who trusted me with a story; someone who prepared a room, drove the extra mile, translated a difficult exchange, made food, kept a promise, or stayed when leaving would have been easier. And there are teachers beyond the human circle. Kayser Ridge has taught through seasons, hummingbird migrations, storms, trees, bees, trails, animals, stone, and water. All my relations extends farther than any list.

Very little of how I see belongs to me alone. Even what feels most personal carries traces of others: a sentence remembered, a standard witnessed, a correction received, a kindness offered before I knew how much I needed it. If I carry any depth, I did not arrive with it alone.

There is another part of this story that reaches back to Chapter 1. For years, I kept important bodies of work in separate rooms. The Tao occupied one. Polarity Thinking occupied another. Leadership, human development, democracy, artificial intelligence, and the accumulated experiences of forty years occupied still others. I had reasons for the separations. I did not want to reduce Mystery to a method, borrow authority that was not mine, or connect ideas merely because I could.

Then a mountain-bike accident stopped my life in 2021: a traumatic brain injury, a fractured C2 vertebra, an arterial dissection, and months when getting from the bed to the bathroom counted as the day’s accomplishment. I was consumed by physical, emotional, and existential pain, unsure what recovery would mean or what kind of life might remain on the other side of it.

I do not believe catastrophe becomes good because something useful eventually follows it. The accident did not arrive carrying a lesson worth its price. It did strip away my confidence that there would always be more time. What had once seemed prudent to postpone began to feel urgent.

During that forced stillness, a thought came through the fog: if I get a second chance at this, I am not keeping the pieces separate anymore. Their distinctions mattered too much to leave unexplored. The task was not to merge them into one thing. It was to bring them into conversation.

The polarity I hear within the chapter is Receiving AND Carrying Forward. Receiving opens us to what others have learned, loved, suffered, practiced, and given. Carrying Forward allows those gifts to participate in lives beyond the ones in which they first appeared. Receiving to the neglect of Carrying Forward can leave gratitude private and unused. Carrying Forward to the neglect of Receiving can become depleted, self-important, and detached from its sources.

Their relationship is alive. What we receive changes what we are able to offer; what we offer prepares us to receive again. While completing this chapter, I was reading Jim Collins’ What to Make of a Life and was struck by his description of “extending out and circling back”: entering genuinely new territory while drawing energy from established strengths. I was especially comforted by how much consequential work in the lives he studied happened late. The accident made time feel finite. Collins’ work made later life feel spacious. Both can be true. Urgency need not become rushing.

The boxes arrived on a Tuesday, stacked on the porch as if they weighed nothing in particular. I cut the tape and lifted out the first copy of And, Volume Two: Applications—forty-two chapters, nine of them mine, some solo and some co-authored, alongside people I had taught beside, learned from, and in some cases never met. I did not expect the weight of it. Not the physical weight. The other kind.

I was alive to hold it. In 2021, that had not been guaranteed. What caught me, holding it, was not the book itself. It was the same recognition that had first come to me right there, and in the recovery that followed: work I already knew mattered to me, work I had been keeping separate without fully realizing it. Holding the book, I felt how much of that work was still undone. That gap was its own kind of fog. One thing inside it was clear: surviving was not the same as finishing what I had started in 2021 — putting those separate rooms under the same roof at last.

If your name does not appear here, I hope you can still recognize your place in these pages. This chapter is for those who loved me, raised me, taught me, challenged me, trusted me, corrected me, forgave me, worked beside me, learned with me, and allowed me to contribute. Thank you for teaching a hard-headed student through every means available, including lessons he understood years later.

What has come through them is not mine to own. I can receive it with gratitude, test it in living, add what experience allows, and offer it onward. The same is true for you. No hand holds the depth; many hands become its trustworthy carriers.

Reflection

Who has carried a depth into your life—and what have you received that is now waiting to be carried forward through you?

Here’s a Polarity Map for Receiving AND Carrying Forward:

Invitations

Use an AI-trained “Chat w/Cliff” for Step 1, Seeing: CLICK HERE

Want to go deeper into Polarity Thinking? See our online self-directed Credentialing and Introduction to Polarity Practice: CLICK HERE